Saturday, 5 April 2014

Why Winning Really Matters When You're Born To Lose

So,
she won. Fallon Fox came out of her comeback fight against Heather Basset last
month with a submission victory forty-four seconds into the second round. I
didn’t see the fight live, because I live in England and needed to get some
sleep before taking part in a writing marathon the next day, but when I woke up
at about six that Saturday morning (the pressures of maturity are conspiring to
turn me from an owl into a lark, much against my will), the result was the
first thing I looked up when I picked up my phone.

Which
was not, however, the first thing I did. The
first thing I did was to look over at the clock on the display and do a little
mental calculation.

‘Six
a.m. now,’ I said to myself, ‘New York is six hours behind us...Chicago...is
Chicago another hour?’ Even if it was, that would still make it eleven at night
in Chicago by then, I figured. And that meant the fight would probably be over
by now, and I could just pick up my phone and find out the result.

Part
of me, however, didn’t want to. Part of me was afraid to do something as simple as picking up the phone.
Because...well, what if she’d lost?

I
was in bed when I found out Fallon had lost the fight before this one, but I
wasn’t getting up in the morning: I was getting ready to go to sleep after a
gig I’d done in Plymouth. It had been a great gig – I’d performed well enough,
but more importantly I’d got to be on the same bill as one of my favourite
poets, the brilliant Joelle Taylor. Joelle and I had then spent the night
wandering around Plymouth with one of the other poets on the bill, former
Birmingham Laureate Stephen Morrison-Burke, before we’d headed back to our
respective hotels. For reasons too complicated to go into here, Joelle was
staying at one of Plymouth’s two Premier Inns while Stephen and I were staying
at a B&B just up the road from Plymouth Hoe. It wasn’t the worst place I’d
stayed in but I’d be lying if I said it was the best. Still, after the long day
I’d had, even the brick-hard mattress of this B&B was a welcome resting-place,
and I pulled my phone out, checked Twitter for one last time before I plugged
the thing in and kicked back for hopefully as much as four whole hours of
sleep...and read Fallon having to respond to the fact that not only
had she lost to Ashlee Evans-Smith, but that the woman who beat her was dishing
out some transphobic hate and saying Fox should not be allowed
to compete in MMA at all, whether she won her fights or not.

That
took the glory out of the night for me: it felt like a kick in the teeth. It
wasn’t just the loss – it was the
fact that the loss was compounded by the familiar calls for trans people to be excluded, to not be
accorded equal space with cis people. But to be honest, the
loss hurt too. I find it hard to handle losing, even vicariously. As a poet
I’ve won a lot of slams, and only lost one – and even then I came second, which
is pretty acceptable really, from a logical standpoint. But emotionally it
hurt. The loss sent me on a binge of self-questioning, self-loathing, and
self-laceration, all, to my chagrin, recorded on my Facebook and Twitter feeds,
as I railed against myself for not being good enough, for playing it too safe
with my material, for wasting the time I’d had on stage trying to win instead
of trying to say something real – and
so on. It took me a long time to come back from that loss, and I know why:
because someone from a reasonably comfortable background, someone with more
privilege, someone starting from a more secure base, can have the luxury of
shrugging off a loss and saying that it’s all about the game, old chap; but
when you spend pretty much every day of your life losing – coping with open
insults in the street and more subtle shade in the workplace, struggling
against bureaucracies and authorities for the right to call yourself a woman, not
being able to turn on Twitter or Facebook most mornings without seeing another
example of a cis ‘journalist’ saying you don’t really exist, saying people like
you shouldn’t be allowed to teach children, or insulting a woman like you to
their face in a supposedly ‘friendly’ interview, reading every day about women
like you being hounded out of bathrooms, or workplaces, or even to their deaths – well, when that’s the life you
live, finding a space where you can win means a lot. And seeing someone like
you winning, in her own way, means a lot too. And so when you lose, or they
lose, the fall is a lot further and the crash-mat of privilege isn’t there to
break that fall. When you’re born to lose, it matters much more if you win. Or
if you fail.

So
when I lay there that Saturday morning, holding my phone and wondering whether
I really wanted to look for the result, the butterflies in my stomach were
wielding pneumatic drills and throwing bangers at the lining. I literally felt
sick with worry. Did I really want to do this? I’d been getting increasingly
nervous about the result since coming back from a gig I’d done in Edinburgh,
when I’d seen one of the first online posters for Fallon’s comeback fight. Her
opponent, Heather Bassett, was much younger, and presumably therefore much
fitter – and it was the lack of fitness caused by not having any testosterone
in her body that had seen Fox lose to Evans-Smith in her last bout. Worse than
that, Bassett was reported to have won her previous match by kicking her
opponent in the head. For some reason this last fact scared the crap out of me.
I found myself feeling genuine anxiety as I sat on that train: my head swam, my
stomach turned somersaults (an impressive feat for such a large tummy,
frankly), and I tried to think of something to do, some way to cope with the
anxiety. And I decided to do it by turning cheerleader.

I’d
written a poem about Fallon the day after I’d heard of her loss. I’d sent her a
link to me performing it on my blog via Twitter, and she
seemed to like it, which was, frankly, some of the nicest feedback I’ve ever
had in my career. I decided to embark on a campaign of sharing the poem a lot
online, and performing it at every gig I did between that train journey and the
fight – partly on the grounds that it might boost her morale in some way (after
all, the effect of having the North East spoken-word scene on your side is a
little-known but possibly crucial factor in pugilistic history. Consider this:
Muhammad Ali visited South Shields in the seventies, because as a convert to
Islam he wanted to visit that town’s long-established Yemeni community. It’s
statistically almost an absolute
certainty that at least one of the
people who saw Ali travelling down Ocean Road in an open-top bus might have been a Tyneside poet. George
Foreman did not visit South Shields,
and therefore did not receive the adoration of anyone even vaguely involved
with verse in the North East in any way. And who won the Rumble in the Jungle? Exactly.) but mainly because it
would give me a way of handling this mounting anxiety. The campaign climaxed
the Thursday night before the fight when I
got the audience at a gig to do a massive pre-fight cheer
for her, by which point it had been a success in at least as much as it had
made me feel less of a nervous wreck. But that morning, as my finger hovered
over the screen of my phone, there was nothing I could do to stop the nerves
hitting me. Except to stop being such a damn coward and look up the damn
result, whatever it was. I was going to a writing marathon later that day, for
God’s sake: if the news was bad I would have a ready-made opportunity to power
through my anger on a wave of righteous trans rage. Just do it, already, I told myself. So I did.

And...she
won. Literally the first Facebook status I saw that morning was Fox expressing
gratitude for her victory. It feels absurd to compare the way I felt then to
the way I felt the morning I discovered that Barack Obama had been elected, but
in a way that was how it felt: not
because the question of who wins in a cage-fight is the same as the question of
who wins in US politics (cage-fighting is, on the whole, a more honourable and
dignified business than electioneering, after all), but because I’d spent the
night nervously awaiting news from America, and, when it finally came, the news
was good. Because when you’re born to lose, the losses that really hurt, hurt
like a punch in the stomach; but the wins? The wins feel like a sunrise, or the
last bars of Beethoven’s Ninth. The wins are Heaven.

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AJ McKenna is a spoken word artist, but hopes to provoke you to disagree with her about that. Her poetry film 'A Letter to a Minnesota Prison' (commissioned by Apples & Snakes and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation)was shown at the South Bank Centre in 2013. In 2015 she premiered her one-woman show 'Howl of the Bantee' at the PBH Free Fringe in Edinburgh. A former Deputy Editor at So So Gay magazine, she now writes for Vada and Clarissa Explains Fuck All.